Business & Industry

A host of businesses have come and gone in Charlevoix. In 1885 Hiram Rifenburg constructed a gristmill on the north side of the channel next to the bridge. In 1896 new owners incorporated the business as the Charlevoix Roller Mills. On December 1, 1903, the operation was incorporated as the Argo Milling Company and flourished for about three decades. In August of 1953, after ten years of negotiations, Earl Young bought the empty rusted building, tore most of it down, and replaced the beloved eyesore with the Weathervane Inn.

Ferry Avenue and Ferry Beach were named after D. M. Ferry who in 1892-93 constructed a building between the railroad tracks and the Pine Lake shore for the production of seed stock harvested from this area’s fertile farms. It was capable of handling 30,000 bushels of peas alone. Within a couple of years, tons of seeds were going out by the train car load. After the collapse of a foundation and a larger rebuilding that was in turn destroyed by fire in 1904, this even larger building remains today.

Several businesses occupied the structure after D. M. Ferry left in 1920. In 1940, Harry Foster and William Wallace bought it for the manufacture of wood products and small watercraft. Wallace pulled out when World War II started. Foster was contracted by the Federal government in 1944-45 to quickly construct 669 small, lightweight, flat-bottomed plywood boats with a single outboard engine that would carry thousands of troops across Europe’s rivers in the final push toward Berlin. In the mid 1980s developers transformed the decrepit building and named it the Foster Boat Works Condos

The huge sugar beet factory, next to Ferry Beach, was begun in August of 1902. The 339’ x 70’ x 70’ structure was completed the next year. But conditions were not quite right here for labor-intensive beet production. Year by year more farmers realized the effort and small return involved, and became reluctant to commit valuable acreage. By 1911 it was all over. The deserted factory decayed and fell in upon itself. The wrecking ball arrived in 1964. Some of the remains became the Irish Boat Shop’s marina dock foundations and breakwaters.

From the early years of the 20th century until the Depression, Charlevoix’s first cement plant mined the thousands of tons of limestone that make up the South Point area west of town. It was located off West Carpenter Street which at one time ran all the way to Lake Michigan. This was a thriving business until the Depression put it under. Its abandoned buildings became the collective term “the lime kilns.” One of the quarries was turned into the town dump.

A big wintertime industry since the 1870s was ice harvesting on both Round Lake and Lake Charlevoix. The United States depended upon Great Lakes ice before electric refrigeration became widespread. In February of 1876, 15,000 tons were removed by a Wisconsin firm from Round Lake alone for the Chicago market. Cutting was done by hand until circular blades were attached to converted auto engines, seen here in 1930.

Breaking the cakes free was a process called “spudding.” Long pike poles guided the blocks through an open channel to a powered conveyor which delivered them to trucks or horse-drawn sledges, one per second. Transported to windowless warehouses on the shores of Lake Charlevoix and Round Lake, the cakes, often weighing up to 150 pounds, were separated and insulated by layers of sawdust from the area’s lumber mills. The spudding seen here is being done just off Depot Beach in 1924. The Inn hotel’s roof is barely visible at upper right.

Crews of men using hooks and cables loaded cut ice right from Lake Charlevoix into boxcars on a railroad siding. Much of the ice was used by railroad companies for their passenger dining cars and to store food for shipment on long journeys. A great deal traveled to the big cities where hotel demand was immense. Charlevoix’s ice usually went to Chicago from where it was distributed all over the country.

John Martin poses beside his Lakeview Dairy delivery wagon. Older residents today can remember milk delivered in glass bottles to their doorsteps. In the depth of a harsh winter, if they didn’t get it inside quickly enough, the milk and cream would freeze and rise from the opening as a white column a couple of inches high, carrying on its top the circular cardboard lid.

Harry Hooker’s horses were a common summer sight in Charlevoix for over three decades. They were housed in his garage at the corner of Antrim and State Streets, now the loading dock area of Oleson’s grocery store. Harry is sixth from the right in the dark coat and hat, in 1923. Hooker’s horses made daily parades through town to a circular paddock on the north side at the corner of Burns and Divisions Streets where he offered riding lessons and excursions.

Ray Hamilton’s boatyard in 1940 on the southeast shore of Round Lake. The sailboats are drying their canvas after a storm. At lower right, the gondola was used to carry the Venetian Queen and her court in the July Venetian Festival parade.

Boat building was an important industry on the south shore of Round Lake. A small army of master boat builders constructed rowboats through Mackinac boats through refitted lumber hookers up to passenger steamers.

In 1959, Charlevoix was chosen as the site of the nation’s fifth nuclear plant, and the first in Michigan, at Consumers Power’s Big Rock Point on the Lake Michigan shore four miles north of town. The plant became a focal point of enormous local pride, bitter condemnation, and constant controversy. But for 35 years after the reactor was powered up at 2:35 P. M. on September 27, 1962, Big Rock Point provided one of the largest tax-paying industries and employers of highly skilled people that Charlevoix and the county has ever experienced.

Big Rock Point was actually a very small plant. It was constructed primarily as a research and development facility with the encouragement and cooperation of the Federal government to investigate various methods for the efficient production of nuclear fuels that hopefully might make them cheaper than coal or gas. Although it did go online a few years after it opened, it never became a profitable component of the Consumers power grid. Kitchi-ossining, the Native-American “big rock” after which the point was named, is visible out in the water at far right.

The reactor was brought into Charlevoix from the south by train on February 5, 1962. It was 30 feet long, 9 feet in diameter with walls 5.5 inches thick, and weighed 120 tons. Protruding from the vessel’s bottom were control rod openings through which up to 84 nuclear fuel bundle exposures and reactions were hydraulically managed. On February 9, the gigantic load was taken on rails into the sphere, tilted upright, and hooked to cables attached to a crane that traveled on its own rails along the top of the concrete reactor core over 90 feet above.

Slowly the vessel rose into the air, hung from the crane while it was inched directly over the reactor housing, centered and pinpointed, then lowered into its home where, buried in tons of concrete, the atomic fuel it held would boil millions of gallons of water into steam that would turn turbines that would power generators for the next three and a half decades. Little Charlevoix, whether it liked it or not, had entered the atomic age in a big way.

Several months before the reactor was installed, a visitors center complete with auditorium was constructed near the sphere and opened on June 24, 1961. It became one of Michigan’s top tourist attractions, believed to be second only to Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village near Detroit. Within seven years, half a million people from every state in the Union and fifty-eight foreign countries had come to learn about nuclear power generation. The center was closed in 1974, by which time over a million visitors had come to see Big Rock Point and Charlevoix.

Even as the Big Rock Point plant set world records for production and established an incredible record for employee safety, industry advances made “the little plant that could” superfluous. More would have been needed to bring it up to modern standards and stringent regulations than it ever could have produced, so Consumers decided to halt operations in 1997. The entire plant, down to the last cubic inch, was removed over several years at a cost of over $400 million, and the land allowed to revert to “green field” in 2006.

By December 9, 2005 Big Rock Point’s reactor housing had been battered and blasted beyond recognition.

Two days later, the last of the bottom portion of the reactor housing stood as a gaping hulk ready to be dynamited away. The remaining segments of Big Rock Point’s sphere appear as rusted sheets of metal at bottom.

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Mother Nature is now reclaiming the land that the Big Rock Point powerhouse sat on. Only the domed Big Rock itself dominates the shoreline today.

The advent of Big Rock Point opened the door for the Medusa Cement Plant on South Point. Sufficient power was now available to allow heavy industry to put down roots. The Medusa Cement Company had owned South Point since 1919, but after the Rock Products plant was closed and torn down, Medusa hadn’t been able to do anything with their land and limestone until Big Rock Point came along. Since 1967, these silos have stored the finished product until the company’s freighter Challenger slips in beside them to download the cement for shipment around the Great Lakes

The Medusa Cement Company has changed hands three times. It became the Southdown Cement Company, then Cemex out of Mexico, and is currently owned by the St. Marys Cement Company of Brazil.